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Why Recursion Pharmaceuticals abandoned cell painting for brightfield imaging
5.7k words, 26 minutes reading time
The Recursion bet is that the resulting model would acquire an extremely strong understanding of the interaction between the visual morphology of cells, their genetic makeup, and drugs applied to them — predicting the rest given one (or two) of the others. Most of the existing papers on the subject are extremely low sample in size, use human-interpretable features for dynamics (cell movement rates, contact time, etc), or don’t even use ML. People were generally excited once the (very high) bar for equivalency had been met — it helps that brightfield is way nicer to run at scale than cell painting — so the whole transition process was a fair bit less painful than I had initially assumed it’d be.
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